For Arnold Burchianti II, business in the past 10 years has been good. Burchianti, founder, president and CEO of Celtic Healthcare, a home health care and hospice provider, has been focused on growing his business through strategic planning and keeping his 450 employees engaged.

That engagement and strategic planning have helped the company reach 2010 revenue of $45 million and has allowed Celtic Healthcare to stay nimble and adaptable in an industry that is always changing.

“When cuts and changes have occurred, which they do quite frequently in the world of Medicare and home health care, you operationalize and try and maximize your efficiencies as best you can,” Burchianti says. “Along that journey it’s been a lot of engaging the work force in alignment with the type of strategy and tactics that we had.”

The company has continued to thrive because everyone at Celtic works for the betterment of the business.

Smart Business spoke to Burchianti about how he keeps his work force engaged and strategically aligned.

Be honest and open. We’re pretty transparent with our employees. Short of issuing a P&L and balance sheet to a nurse who won’t understand it, we give them everything we can. We try and paint that picture and get them to really understand how and why as leaders we’re doing the things that we’re doing.

We go in and show them our overhead costs, the leadership’s wages and costs according to benchmarking data that we get from cost reports and we put it out there. By really engaging the work force as to what’s going on in the industry through benchmarking data, comparing us to them and showing them where we need to improve and why we need to improve for sustainability, it makes it a little easier when you walk in and show them the facts.

Are they always happy with our decisions? Hell no, but as a leader you have to engage them and you have to be transparent. You have to let them know why you’re doing stuff so they can trust you. That’s the fundamentals of great leadership. You’ve got to get people to be engaged, to trust you and be transparent.

Understand your culture. I believe you need to come up with strategies to engage your employees and one of the best ways to do that is to take a look at the cultural health of your organization. We do these cultural tests and we pay a lot of money for it, but its well worth it. I could tell you twice a year exactly what my top three things are for corporate health and culture.

It’s easy to get baselines on your financials, on your marks, on many legislative things, on your turnover rate, but getting an objective read on culture, you can’t just go into a room and ask somebody, because they’re not always going to tell you the truth. As a leader or CEO, you can’t listen to your VPs and people around you all the time, because sometimes those people are micro-managers and they just hear what they want to hear. You as a leader need to go transcend beyond that and most of us don’t have the ability to do it ourselves. You need to bring someone in at least every few years to run these types of exercises. I’m not saying bring someone in to train and make things better; you’ve got to understand what the issue is first.

Once you’ve heard and gained the information, then you tell them that you heard them and tell them what you’re going to do. Let them know where the progress is. It’s really an art of engaging your employees and making sure you understand the health of your culture. If your people aren’t engaged and you’ve got to make a change because of a market or legislative issue, good luck, because a company like Celtic is going to beat you there 500 times faster, because we can move quicker. The small and the fast always eat the big guys’ lunch.

Form a plan. The No. 1 thing is proper strategic planning. That means making sure you understand your values and that you understand what is the single most important priority that your organization has to accomplish for your vision and mission. You have to make sure you understand what your values are, because that lays out what your strategy is going to be and what’s important to you and keeps you from chasing 9 million different facets.

Once you understand what that vision or mission statement is then … you’ve got to get your work force engaged or at least your leadership engaged and you need to be meeting with them in some cases daily or weekly. You’ve got to make sure when they wake up in the morning they are thinking about that. That’s where people fail; they’re chasing a lot of different ideas, they’re putting out fires and everyone thinks within their own division what they’re working on is their priority. Everyone needs to be aligned with that single most important corporate goal.

HOW TO REACH: Celtic Healthcare, (800) 355-8894 or www.celtichealthcare.com

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